Fungal Activism and Sovereignty in Ethnomycology

This paper is a transcript of Guliana Furci’s talk given at the Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference organized by the Center for the Study of World Religions in May 2025.

This essay tells the story of what happens after a shift in environmental and cultural understanding and what it takes for such changes to take root in political and ethical life. If science is just beginning to open its eyes to the vital role fungi play in ecosystems, then the question becomes, what’s next? 

Specifically, how do new insights reshape public policy, reframe conservation, and challenge entrenched systems of knowledge production? What happens when those shifts come up against colonial legacies, extractive research practices, and epistemologies that don’t recognize relational knowledge or the rights non-human life? 

The work I do is driven by these questions. I am the foundress and director of the Fungi Foundation—the first nonprofit in the world dedicated to fungal conservation. We are a global organization that explores fungi to increase knowledge of their diversity, promote innovative solutions to contingent problems, educate about their existence and applications, and recommend public policy for their conservation. We were founded in Chile almost fifteen years ago and have an office in the USA as well. 

To tell you how I got here, I need to start by sharing the profound sense of injustice that came over me several years ago. I realized that no matter where you looked in conservation frameworks and legislation on biodiversity they only ever spoke about plants and animals. Just two “Fs”—flora and fauna—to refer to macroscopic life of Earth. 

And let’s be honest, that’s just scientifically incorrect. Macroscopic life on Earth is not represented just by plants and animals. It’s also composed of a third F, fungi—organisms that play a vital role in making systems ecosystems by sustaining the life of land plants through complex mycorrhizal networks, recycling organic matter on the planet through decomposition, helping to prevent accelerated climate change by storing carbon below the ground, among many other functions. Given all that fungi do and are, to exclude them from our description of macroscopic life isn’t just unfair to them; it’s also dangerous to us. We cannot omit a whole kingdom of life that makes ours possible. And that omission—that injustice—was the fuel I needed to found the Fungi Foundation and work to achieve durable change for the fungi, their habitats, and the people that depend on them.  

Our first undertaking was to champion the inclusion of fungi in environmental legislation, and we’ve had some success. Between 2010 and 2013, we helped the Chilean government include fungi, alongside plants and animals, at the highest level of legislation – an organic law of the State. Chile was the first country in the world to do this and that legislation was followed by mandated regulations that have led to fungi being included in environmental impact assessments (EIA); every EIA in Chile has to include a fungi baseline study. In other words, no new development can take place, whether a road or a mine, without first surveying how it would impact the fungi in the area, in addition to the plants and animals.

In effect, we have helped fungi become a conservation “tool.” But including fungi in conservation frameworks wasn’t just a scientific task. It meant working against deep-seated assumptions about what counts as biodiversity and whose knowledge systems shape policy. For example, we’ve been “red listing” species—categorizing them as threatened with extinction on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species—for years. Most people know that tree or animal species can be endangered, and so can fungi. We’ve been working together with committees in government in order to carry out assessments of the threats to fungi species, as well as implementing measures to prevent their disappearance. 

Chile was the start. At the global level, fungi were largely still missing in policy frameworks and conservation plans. 

So, in 2017, under the mentorship of Harvard Asa Gray Professor Emeritus and mycologist Dr Donald H. Pfister, scientists from Argentina, Brazil, and myself, from Chile, came together for an informal gathering during a conference in Peru. Over drinks, we shared frustrations that fungi weren’t included in common language referring to macroscopic life on Earth. We decided then that we wanted to abolish the tyranny of the two Fs! Creating space for fungi in our language was, largely, an act of epistemic rebellion: a way to push back against the narrow frames through which life is categorized, protected, and made thinkable in education and public policies. So, we proposed a new term that could be placed alongside flora and fauna to talk about macroscopic diversity of fungi in a given place or time. 

Looking back into the scientific and cultural literature for inspiration, we found a term, funga, which had been used in some Scandinavian publications. But, unlike the terms flora and fauna, funga doesn’t have roots in Latin or Greek. In order to be scientifically precise, we would have to say fauna, flora, and mycota or fauna, flora, and mycobiota. But…it just didn’t sound right.

Finally, in 2018 we, Francisco Kuhar, Giuliana Furci, Elisandro R. Drechsler-Santos, and Donald H. Pfister delimited the new F word based on the ease it would signify to speak of 3F’s instead of 2, and formally published the 3F Proposal—flora, fauna, and funga—as a way forward for the rapid inclusion of fungi in legislation and education public policies. And it took off. Now, seven years later, almost 30 countries have incorporated this word at some level of policy. More fundamentally, we made funga visible and cool. We made it shameful not to talk about fungi. 

This success is evident in the fact that, for the first time in 130 years, National Geographic put fungi on its cover in all languages, everywhere. And not only were fungi on the cover, but they were featured in more than 40 pages, which included the sexiest centerfold I've ever seen—the fungal tree of life. A four-page spread! 

But that’s just what the public sees. The National Geographic Society also changed its definition of wildlife to include fungi, thereby unlocking research funding for mycologists and explorers.

At the Fungi Foundation, we want people to fall in love with fungi. After all, life is better with fungi. Without them, there’d be no yeast, meaning no wine, no beer, no bread, no coffee, no chocolate—so many things we love! Every time we make a toast, we should thank the fungi.

People come to love fungi in different ways. Though this wasn’t the start of it, I want to share an episode that fueled my fungal love.  I was in a museum called Maggiorino Borgatello, located in Punta Arenas, Chile, at the southern tip of South America.  There, I saw an exhibit of the base of a giant puffball that said the fungus was used as a fire-starter by the Fuegian People, who are Indigenous to the Tierra del Fuego region and suffered a devastating genocide at the hands of the British in the second half of the 19^th century.

The exhibit struck me, because I'd seen the puffball many times in the field. It has many names today: Calvatia, bejín, tabaquera. It’s edible when young, and the spores are medicinal. And, it turns out, you can use the sterile base of the fungus to start a fire. 

It was an incredible moment for me. I realized for first time that even in the extreme subpolar environment, humans have a relationship—a fundamental relationship, a life-saving relationship—with a fungus. Not just through its edibility, but more fundamentally through its practicality as a fire-starter and its extraordinary medicinal characteristics.

The exhibit reminded me of Ötzi the Iceman. In 1991, hikers in the Austrian alps discovered the mummified remains of a man who lived between 3350 and 3105 BC.  They called him the Iceman. At the time he died, Ötzi was carrying fungi—a conk mushroom, so a different species from the one used in South America, but one we think was used as a firestarter, as well as a medicine for stomach parasites.

In April 2021, I had the opportunity to hear of the same relationship with a similar fungus in the Mapuche culture in southern Chile. I found it remarkable that Ötzi, living 5,000 years ago, had a relationship with fungi that is echoed in modern-day Chile. 

A later trip to Cambodia deepened the wonder I feel about the relationships humans formed with fungi over millennia and across continents. I was looking for a huge bas-relief in Angkor Wat that depicts the deity Shiva, holding what seemed to be a mushroom – evidence, again, for the ancient and seemingly universal relationship humans have with fungi. 

And there are many common themes across cultures. For example, we see a recurring motif between lightning and mushroom apparition. Even today, there are places around the world where children are taught to hunt for mushrooms the day after a big storm. You find this connection even in the ancient Greeks, who linked the appearance of mushrooms to thunderbolts. In Mesoamerica, some communities use the same word for mushrooms and lightning—Amanita muscaria, for example. And this isn’t solely in mythology; there’s exciting research that shows electrical pulses can double mushroom yields in cultivation.

So that got me thinking. I wondered, what if we built a map? Why not gather all the available information—from peer-reviewed journals, general publications, and oral histories—to try to understand the relationships humans have had with fungi that go beyond edibility, including ceremonial, medicinal, cosmetic, textile, and even ornamental relationships?

More than two years later, the result was a global map, with entries from all over the world documenting these diverse human-fungus relationships. Some patterns started to emerge. For example, the same genera of fungus appeared to be used in remarkably similar ways across cultures that had no known contact with one another. For example, groups as diverse as the Miwok people in Yosemite, Indigenous communities in Colombia, and Aboriginal groups in Australia have all independently developed the same kinds of relationships with the same types of fungi. That kind of convergence is fascinating, and possibly suggests that, through trial and error, all discovered the same benefits. 

At the Fungi Foundation we began to unpack and analyze the data. We saw many trends. One involves puffballs. Across many regions, the spores of the puffball are commonly applied to help treat wounds. 

Even today, you’ll find shepherds—like many in South America—carrying small pouches of puffball spores while tending livestock in the mountains. If an animal gets injured, the spores are used for treatment. This practice is surprisingly widespread.

The same goes for conks—large, wood ear–like fungi that are widely used as tinder. Such patterns suggest deeply rooted cultural coevolutions with fungi. It has been incredible to see the extent and commonality of some of these relationships.

But then we had a moment of reckoning. We realized that most of the relationships we had documented were collected without free, prior, informed consent, let alone educated consent, and it became clear to us that shifting scientific understandings wasn’t enough. Without changes to the ethics and politics of knowledge production, we’d risk replicating the very systems that made fungi invisible in the first place. The majority of the sources we were drawing from, including many peer-reviewed papers, reflected what we call colonial extractivism: a way of gathering and disseminating knowledge that takes and submits and dominates. To amplify that kind of information would be to be complicit in it.

And as an organization we felt we couldn’t do that. So, we stopped the published mapping project altogether. 

But then we had to ask, what now? The situation is urgent. These deep relationships with fungi are held by elders in communities—by grandparents who learned from their own grandparents. But their grandchildren, many of whom now live in cities, aren’t going into the forest with them. The lines of oral transmission are breaking. Our knowledge of how to identify and relate to fungi may be as endangered as many fungi themselves.

And every time we’re out in the field we hear the same things from elders. They tell us: we learned these relationships from our grandparents, but our grandchildren are gone. This knowledge is about to be lost. You’ve arrived just in time.

And they also say something else that really moves me: No one has ever asked us about our relationships with fungi before. People have asked them about medicinal plants, about animals, about other aspects of traditional ecological knowledge—but never fungi.

That really hit home. And of course, there are deeper challenges: the erosion of language, questions of data sovereignty, the right to define and control how knowledge is shared. But even asking the question, starting the conversation about fungi, was an important first step to addressing these bigger issues. 

These fungi are “Ayuda-Vivir”—“Life-Help.” That’s what this work is about. These fungal relationships carry ways of knowing and relating that have helped humans survive—through change, through history, through crisis. These are the kinds of things we’ll need to help us keep living, to help us live on this planet, especially in a time of rapid ecological change. Losing that knowledge is no small thing. 

So, we said, OK, we have all this information. There’s more coming in. What do we do?

We turned to the ethical guidelines. Surely, we thought, ethnomycology must have some.

But we found nothing. There were no established ethical guidelines for this field. We looked to guidelines from other fields but found most didn’t reflect a worldview that includes the Rights of Nature, for example. In other words, we weren’t just confronting a gap in policy. We were confronting a clash of epistemologies. To truly reckon with fungi as kin, not just objects of study, meant rethinking the very terms under which knowledge is gathered, shared, and valued. For example, the idea that fungi—or any other non-human being—might themselves have rights was completely absent. Likewise, the framework we refer to as the “3Fs” wasn’t included, and the voices of elders weren’t given the prominence we felt they deserved.

So we decided to write our own ethical guidelines for ethnomycology research. We initially created them to clarify our own position. But we also published them to offer a starting point for the broader field. We propose nine principles, developed in collaboration with people from around the world. They’re free and currently available in three languages. These guidelines are intended to be living documents—evolving, improving, and responsive.

Through our guidelines, we emphasize the need to center data sovereignty. We cannot replicate colonial patterns of taking knowledge—especially sacred or relational knowledge—and publishing it without consent, particularly now, when companies are actively patenting compounds and species, many of which are connected to traditional relationships and ancestral knowledge. We have started to work on a repository of oral histories that respects data sovereignty, one that allows Indigenous Peoples and traditional communities to control whether or how their knowledge is shared. 

With these guidelines in mind, as I sit down with elders around the world to record their oral histories, I do so with extreme care. In many cases, I’m deeply apologetic. I assure them: This is private. We will not share it. We just want to record your relationship with fungi, and we’ll leave the recording with you. We conduct the interview, and if the elder chooses, we put the recording on a thumb drive and hand it over then and there. We also provide a written and/or recorded commitment that we will not use or share the material without permission.

And sometimes—often, actually—I’m surprised. I’ll say, We won’t share this, and they’ll respond, But why not? We want the world to know. Please share this. 

Moments like that really move me. They make me realize that I sometimes carry the burden of a colonial, extractive mindset. even as I try not to replicate it. What I need to do, more than anything, is to listen. To ask, rather than assume.

To conclude, I want to share examples of some of our ongoing work around the world, places where we are showing up to listen and learn. 

In Oaxaca, Mexico, we’re helping to open a museum in collaboration with an organization called Historias y Memorias Mazatecas (Mazatec History and Memories)—an extraordinary archive built by Renato García Dorantes, one of the town’s photographers and videographers, and guarded and curated by his son Inti García Flores. The archive offers a powerful retelling of Mazatec history, one that challenges and expands the dominant narratives. It highlights these People’s relationship not only with fungi, but also with a variety of plants, reframing their cultural and ecological knowledge in vivid, lived terms.

In the Andean Araucanía Region of Chile, we’ve had the honor of building a relationship with a Mapuche elder, Don Neftalí Carinao. The videos we’ve captured offer beautiful glimpses into how the Mapuche Nation relates to fungi through food, healing, and memory. 

At one point, Don Talí as we call him asked to share a song with us. It was a mushroom-gathering song passed down from his grandfather, who used to sing it while foraging. In the video, you can hear him sing it softly, translating bits as he goes: “Curioso mi abuelo . . . ” he says—my grandfather was curious—as he invokes a lineage of foragers, singers, and memory-keepers. Don Talí asked us to help carry forward his grandfather’s mushroom song—an offering of continuity, care, and cultural memory.

We’ve also been working in India, where tribes in the northeastern region generously shared their mushroom songs and ancestral knowledge. We’ve produced a poetic, intimate short film called The Mushroom Keepers,¹ available online, that captures what two women, one from the Khasi and one from the Garo tribes, wanted to share about their relationships with mushrooms.

With the help of anthropologist, musician and field recordist Cosmo Sheldrake, we’ve been documenting ancestral relationships with fungi around the world. Some communities—such as those we worked with in Ecuador—have asked us not to share what they’ve recorded, and we are honoring those wishes. We recently traveled to Cusibamba, Peru, where we recorded two knowledge-keepers, Doña Geraldina and Doña Leonarda, sharing a Kichwa mushroom-gathering song they had learned from their grandparents and still sing today as they search for mushrooms in the field. The recordings were left immediately in their hands for the safeguarding of their knowledge.

These are all living examples of the kinds of relationships we form with diverse communities around the world in the spirit of supporting and documenting their mycological cultural heritage. 

For now, we leave each recording with the person or community—sometimes with local schools, wherever they wish—and we take only a backup, alongside a written or recorded agreement about how, or whether, the material may be shared. At the Fungi Foundation, our role is not to extract or disseminate this knowledge—it’s to ensure that grandchildren and future generations have access to the relationships and songs that are in danger of being forgotten, simply because no one ever asked.

I’ll admit, sharing these struggles with you makes me a bit nervous. We haven’t figured everything out. But I also want to extend an invitation: If anyone knows of repositories, frameworks, or ways forward that honor sovereignty and relational knowledge, please contact us. We’re looking for collaborators. We’re listening.

As the world wakes up to the importance of fungi, the real challenge lies in what happens next. Recognizing fungi as ecologically vital is one step; transforming the institutions, languages, and ethics that structure our engagement with them is another. That’s the work I’ve tried to describe here. We’re not just naming fungi but learning how to listen to the People who know them and the relationships that nurture them. If we’re serious about changing our minds, we must also be serious about changing our systems.